I've always been a big reader - I just finished two sci fi books on my last trip to Dallas (I still need to post the reviews for those). What I'm finding lately is this: I'd much prefer to read on my iPad than read on paper.

Why? A few reasons:

The iPad is light. I can carry as many books as I like on it, and it doesn't get heavier

I can buy a new book anytime I have access to the net

I don't ever have to worry about losing my place - the Kindle app manages that for me

I think the weight thing is the big one. I'd really rather not cart a bunch of books in my travel bag - especially since they are just so much dead weight after I've finished. Even with books I've been waiting for, like Towers of Midnight - I'll wait for the digital edition. The hardcover is too big, and even the paperback (when it comes out) will take up a lot of space.

Welcome to episode 10 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week David and I spoke about the supposed interchangeability of developers - something management longs for. While we don't think this is advisable or desirable, there are some ways in which some level of interchnageablility is useful: no one wants a dead project because a key developer leaves.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

Welcome to episode 10 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week David and I spoke about the supposed interchangeability of developers - something management longs for. While we don't think this is advisable or desirable, there are some ways in which some level of interchnageablility is useful: no one wants a dead project because a key developer leaves.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

I just finished reading a very interesting book - "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson. I also finished the second (of three?) books in the series, "Axis". The books are connected, but can be read separately - it does help to read Spin first so that you know how things got to be the way they are.

To summarize the plot of the first book, one night the stars go out. Panic ensues, and then things get progressively more odd as the reason for the blackout is found: the Earth has been wrapped in some kind of barrier that keeps time passing normally as billions of years pass beyond the barrier. That gives rise to a bunch of "end of the world" cults, as it seems obvious what will happen if the barrier is removed after enough time has passed that the Sun itself starts to expire.

Suffice to say that doesn't play out exactly as the doomsayers expect - but neither do things "go back to normal", either.

The second book is concerned with what happens after the spin barrier is removed. I don't really want to get too far into that, as doing so would spoil the first book. It leaves a lot for a follow on book though, so I'm certainly looking forward to that.

While the setting is near future, and it's clearly a sci-fi setting, it's mostly about the people. I became very attached to a number of the people - one thing I will say is that Wilson is not afraid to kill off characters, even ones that have become quite central to the story thus far. That keeps you reading - no one is safe. I'm looking foward to book three, and if you like pondering how people would collectively and individually handle a presumed apocalypse - that then doesn't play out as the worst fears had it - these are great books.

It's the end of the year, so it's time to look at the schedule for the videos and podcasts. JS4U and ST4U will be on hold after Wednesday until the new year; there will be at lest one more "Independent Misinterpretations" before the end of the year, but then that will go on hiatus until January as well.

Have a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and enjoy the archives until January rolls in!

The two things that you spend most of your time doing as a programmer — coding and debugging — are made noticeably easier and more fun by that combination of Smalltalk language and IDE. The language syntax is small, powerful, expressive, introspective. The entire stack (and libraries, and IDE) is written in Smalltalk (turtles all the way down), and you have access to the source code, allowing you to study and extend all operations, basic and complex. The code organization — explicit, first-class visual IDE support for packages, classes, protocols (groupings of methods by intended use) and methods — is extremely helpful.

Follow the link and see what he says about the debugger - non-Smalltalkers often miss the power of the debugger in Smalltalk.

I have two - count 'em, two - strings of lights across my doorway and the step railings outside:

As I was plugging them in, they went out. I thought one string had dropped a fuse, so I went looking for replacements - and found my battery backup in the basement (the one I use for the router) beeping. The ground fault on that plug had popped. How the heck are two lousy strings of lights an overload state?

The Aida 6 web framework is rather different in objectives than Seaside 3 as a Smalltalk application server. My specific interest was to determine to what extent the services for web applications were orthogonal to any given web markup. Both default to HTML but I am looking at frameworks suitable for emitting declarative Curl markup using the Curl web content language (originally MIT and now Sumisho.)

The rise of various streaming TV options - from DVRs to Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, (etc) - has done a fair amount of damage to the traditional "appointment tv" model. Now there's some real evidence of what the future of that model looks like: sports:

Of the 20 highest-rated telecasts of any kind so far this television season, 18 have been N.F.L. games on CBS, NBC or Fox. In terms of the best of 2010, nothing else comes close. Of the 50 highest-rated programs during the calendar year, 27 have been N.F.L. games, including 8 of the top 10.

This makes perfect sense to me - watching recorded games is hard, because it's just too easy to hear about the results elsewhere. Beyond that though? Most shows now have a niche audience, which means that it's pretty easy to avoid spoilers.

Beyond mass audience things like NFL games though, it makes the standard ad supported model harder and harder to justify.

The fact that the people in charge of the FCC actually seem to believe this tells me that they have no business regulating anything more complex than their utensils drawer - and that might be pushing it:

the release says that only "measured steps" to regulating wireless are necessary because "open operating systems like Android" have been released, and that it wants to see how Verizon and other 700MHz spectrum winners handle the hotly-contested openness requirement when building out 4G.

Right... because how a carrier handles bits over the air has so much to do with what OS is running on the receiving device. I'll be over here, in the corner, laughing my whatever off at all the clowns who think the FCC is doing anything useful.

I spent a fair bit of the evening playing the new DLC for Fallout: New Vegas
. It's not bad - but it does have a fair bit of similarity to one of the DLC packs for Fallout 3
- "The Pitt":

You get captured and lose all of your equipment

It's a one way trip, with your return dependent on finishing the task at hand

The whole thing is being run by a whack job escapee from the Brotherhood of Steel (I'm giving nothing away by saying that it's Brother Elijah, the guy who really wanted to stay at Helios)

Mind you, there are huge differences as well. I was able to run through Pitt and find all the guns, ammo, and armore I wanted. Theer seemed to be plenty of stimpacks lying around too, as I recall. In Sierra Madre, that's just not the case. There's virtually no guns or amm to be found - I've been pumping up my melee skills since I started it (the level cap goes up to 35 with this dlc). Still, my health has been running at 50 percent or less most of the time. The only health I manage to find is out of the vending machines, and that requires me to find lots of casino chips. To be fair, those are all over, albeit in small-ish numbers.

You also lose your entire party - again, a lot like "The Pitt". Inside, you end uphaving to take the crew you find and deploy them to various places on the map (and convince each of them to stay there) as you go off to open up the casino proper. That's as far as I've managed to get - I was on my way to the bell tower when I ran out of time for the day.

My advice? Bring in a leveled up (at least 20th) guy with both melee and survival pushed up. Your gun and energy weapon skills just won't help you that much.

I hope all of the people who've been pining for network neutrality know what they just got from the FCC - it's a huge win for the existing carriers and cable companies. Why do I say that? Take this statement:

"A commercial arrangement between a broadband provider and a third party to directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic in the connection to a subscriber of the broadband provider (i.e., 'pay for priority') would raise significant cause for concern," the Commission then elaborates. This is because "pay for priority would represent a significant departure from historical and current practice."

So to take a for instance - NetFlix couldn't pay to get priority for their traffic. Meanwhile, the local cable outlet (or telco) ships video on demand down the "cable" channel (although it actually comes down the same pipe), and gets to prioritize the heck out of it.

I sure hope all the idealists are happy now. The only good news here is this: based on recent court decisions, it's likely that the FCC overstepped its authority. I certainly hope that's how this plays out.

How did I miss The Diner returning? I love Lileks' stuff, and the podcast seemed to disappear in 2009 - there was a gap between March and October, and I just dropped the subscription. Now I wish I hadn't!

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at an issue I ran into with VisualWorks at my new job: the way listboxes with multi-select turned on behave with drag/drop. I've posted the code to the package MultiSelectPatch in the Public Store Repository. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

Here's another video from ESUG 2010, which was held in Barcelona, Spain, the week of September 13, 2010. In this presentation, Veronica Uquillaz-Gomez talks about analyzing system changes using their Torch tools. You can watch using the embedded player below, or follow this link to Vimeo.

GuyWhoSteals has a nice post up comparing and contrasting the options for Seaside development and deployment. The upshot: you have a lot of good options across multiple platforms:

Both Squeak/Pharo and VisualWorks are cross-platform, with the virtual machine and IDE working almost identically on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. Currently, I do development on Windows and Ubuntu Linux (depending on which machine I’m working on), and deploy to a web server running Linux. I hope this sheds some light on this very individual set of decisions. One last thing I’d like to reiterate: If you’re new to Smalltalk and Seaside, you essentially can’t go wrong with the main 3 distributions (VisualWorks, GLASS or Pharo). All three are excellent cross-platform environments, and the choice between them comes down to commercial support, licensing fees (and, in the case of Gemstone, whether or not you need a first class object-oriented database).

Keep in mind that the VA Smalltalk product is a good choice as well, if OS X isn't in your list of platforms.

Dave Winer has a thoughtful post up about our ability to trust vendors with our public content - what if they decide to pull the plug (as numerous vendors have done with WikiLeaks)?

The question is this: What service-level guarantees do we need from vendors to make it possible to use their services in our public writing.

The problem runs even deeper, I think. Even if I bought my own server, and then paid to have, say, a T1 run to my house - I still have to rely on my domain being registered. Heck, even if I register a non US domain (or, if a person outside the US registers one beyond their borders), that doesn't get out from under the problem.

Right now, the entire system runs on trust and a general lack of centralization. That's why I worry about the FCC and their "net neutrality" rules - to my way of thinking, centralizing runs the very real risk of making control easier to assert. I think the best we can do here is leave the system with as little central control as possible.